Abstract
This paper examines the impact from one of the most commonly used online instructional technologies, simulation and reference hyperlinks, on the learning outcomes over varied course assessments in MBA Economics online courses. The empirical results confirm the positive impact of effective hyperlink insertion on both overall performance and individual student’s performance over exams and discussion board. The learning pattern of voluntary hyperlink usage is also explored. For the average learning outcome improvement, a compulsory usage of hyperlinks should be designed. The evaluation of appropriate usage in the case can be of significant practice to school administrators seeking to implement a required instructional technology in a rigorous and pedagogically sound manner.
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Notes
In the survey of Allen and Seaman (2008), the U.S. higher education institutes have a wide lead in online penetration for psychology, social sciences and liberal arts, over eight major discipline areas.
WebCT (WebCT Inc., Lynnfield, Mass) and Blackboard (Blackboard Inc., Washington, DC) are the most widely used online courseware systems. See Cook and Dupras (2004).
As noted by Johnson and Aragon (2002), instructional designers need to follow the “Rule of Seven”, which suggests that the amount of information presented at one time should be limited to no more than seven times (Clement 1985). In addition, Cook and Dupras (2004) also argued that appropriate links enrich a website and enhance function, but too may links may detract.
A 100 percent online course means that all learning activities, course assessments, and communication are completed online, compared with the “blended” online education environment combining both face-to-face and online components in which online instructional technologies are only considered as supplemental teaching tools. See Ausburn (2004).
Based on a Fall 2007 survey, the GetEducated.com calculated the rankings by comparing publicly posted tuition and distance education fees at 62 AACSB accredited and AACSB candidate universities in the U.S that offer 106 master’s degrees through distance education in the career area of business administration.
GMAT scores are excluded here due to the wavier policy for school admission. Applicants for MBA program in the UHV may request a waiver for the GMAT if they have (1) a graduate or professional degree from an accredited U.S. college or university; or (2) at least two years of relevant professional and/or management/supervisory experience with an above-3.0 undergraduate GPA; or (3) a sufficient GRE score as replacement. Only one third of students in our case took the GMAT test.
Age (young) has been considered as one of the main characteristics for cyberlearning preference, particularly in undergraduate courses. Ogunleye (2010) argued that the difference of learning outcomes may be disturbed by the self-selection bias, in comparison of face-to-face and online courses; that is, younger learners prefer online rather than face-to-face.
Yi and Herlihy (2007) proved that the implementation of an open-URL link resolve directly/has contributed to library data usage increase. If the hyperlinks for library research were inserted, the possible long hours for data search might mislead the impacts on student performance from time spent online and URL browsing time.
Except contextual learning, the outcomes of social learning, active learning, and reflective leaning, may not be measured by scores of ordinary course assessments such as exams and homework assignments. See Johnson and Aragon (2002).
Respondus LockDown Brower, blocking activities including copy/paste, software operation, and web-browsing, was required for taking online exams in all the sessions in the case.
In addition, we also verified the variance inflation factor (VIF) which quantifies the severity of multicollinearity in an ordinary least squares regression analysis. The VIFs between total time spent online and hyperlink browsing time to all dependent variables were only 1.337 in our case. A common rule of thumb is that if VIF is greater than 10 for multicollinearity. See Kutner et al. (2004).
Many universities, including the University of Houston-Victoria, have implemented Adobe Connect for online instructor to save any presentation or video as a URL link under the university’s system. It makes the tracking record of WebCT or Blackboard more accurate to reveal frequency and time for online activities.
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Chen, CP., Chen, YJ. Evaluation of Instructional Technologies in Cyberspace Economics Teaching: Does Hyperlink Really Matter?. Atl Econ J 39, 355–368 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-011-9282-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-011-9282-2